After the Joe Janes keynote, a colleague said to me that she doesn’t think of librarians as being content creators who should spend a lot of time in Wikipedia, because we’re not the “subject specialists”. And I vehemently disagreed, saying that I think we are all content creators, because we’re all “subject specialists” about something.
I have a few main thoughts about this:
- We have to stop thinking about authority in old ways. We are all subject experts about something.
- We have to stop thinking about content creation in old ways. Publishers, academics, and librarians are no longer gatekeepers for content creation and distribution, and we have to let it go.
- We need to start experimenting, and building the content confidence of all of the people who think that they have no subject authority.
- The world will not end if this happens.